Town Council Prepares For Its Turn With The Proposed Budget

Only one person took the opportunity to address the Town Council and the School Committee at a public hearing on the proposed budget Monday night. But that doesn't mean the spending plan for next fiscal year is set in stone. In fact, the process is just getting started.

The School Department submitted to the town a budget for about $500,000 more than the one Town Manager Bill Sequino proposed last week. And the Town Council may well suggest further cuts to the plan put forth by Sequino, a 4.17 percent increase from this current year's budget, said Council President Michael Isaacs.

"I would like to see the tax rate come down," Isaacs said after the meeting. "And now begins the hard work of going about that."

During the meeting, Isaacs told the School Committee that they should not take offense if their budget is cut further. And afterwards, Mercurio said he doesn't yet know where he will find the $500,000 in cuts that Sequino suggested in his first draft of the budget.

"We'll start as far away from the classroom as we can," Mercurio said, when asked where further budget cuts could come from. "We'll look at athletics. Then we'll go back and look at what were some of the things in the 'needs' column that could be in the 'would be nice' column."

Mercurio said he did not yet know if the School Committee would push back against the suggested cuts from Sequino, or any further cuts implemented by the Council.

Councilor Mark Gee said staff cuts may be necessary from either the town or the school side of the budget.

"One of the things we are dealing with is increases in health benefits," Gee said after the meeting. Increases to municipal employee benefits, pensions and compensation could add more than $750,000 to next year's budget. "It seems to me that one way to deal with that is to decrease the number of people."

Sequino's proposed spending plan calls for a net increase of .5 employees, even though he also suggests eliminating one position from the Town Clerk office.

Isaacs said the Council will start meeting with department heads to see where the proposed budget might be able to be trimmed.

He said a new firing range in the police station, a capital outlay in the proposal estimated to cost about $126,000, would only be built if it could save money. Currently, officers utilize overtime pay to practice shooting elsewhere and the facility could potentially be rented out to other police departments that need such a training facility.

According to Sequino's proposed budget, spending would increase next year by 6.4 percent to $47,855,946. However, the tax rate would only increase by 4.3 percent because about $850,000 of debt service for municipal and school projects would be paid for out of federal stimulus money.

Sequino's proposed budget calls for a $0.71 increase to the tax rate, from $17.25 per thousand dollars of assessed property to $17.96. Under this spending plan, a resident who owns a home worth $350,000 would pay $6,286 in property taxes next fiscal year compared to $6,037.50 this year, a difference of $248.50.